Susan Cannon Harris teaches in the Department of English and the Keough Institute for Irish Studies. Her book Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2017. Harris's first book, Gender and Modern Irish Drama, was published in 2002 and won two awards. She has also published articles in PMLA, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, James Joyce Quarterly, Eire-Ireland, Victorian Literature and Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, Breac, and The Emily Dickinson Journal.

The first modern Irish playwrights emerged in London in the 1890s, at the intersection of a rising international socialist movement and a new campaign for gender equality and sexual freedom. Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions shows how Irish playwrights mediated between the sexual and the socialist revolutions, and traces their impact on left theatre in Europe and America from the 1890s to the 1960s. Drawing on archival research, the study reconstructs the engagement of Yeats, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey, and Beckett with socialists and sexual radicals like Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, Florence Farr, Bertolt Brecht, and Lorraine Hansberry.

Arguing that the representations of sacrificial violence central to the work of the Abbey playwrights are intimately linked with constructions of gender and sexuality, Gender and Modern Irish Drama goes beyond an examination of the relationship between Irish national drama and Irish nationalist politics to the larger question of the way national identity and gender identity are constructed through each other. Radically redefining the context in which the Abbey plays were performed, Harris documents the material and discursive forces that produced Irish conceptions of gender.